Wal-Mart
Charged with Selling Non-Organic Food as Organic(Beyond
Pesticides, November 15, 2006) The Cornucopia
Institute, an organic farming watchdog organization, has filed a
formal legal complaint with USDA asking them to investigate allegations
of illegal “organic” food distribution by Wal-Mart Stores,
Inc. Cornucopia has documented cases of non-organic food products being
sold as organic in Wal-Mart’s grocery departments.

“We first
noticed that Wal-Mart was using in-store signage to misidentify conventional,
non-organic food as organic in their upscale-market test store in Plano,
Texas,” said Mark Kastel of the Cornucopia Institute. Subsequently,
Cornucopia staff visited a number of other Wal-Mart stores in the Midwest
and documented similar improprieties in both produce and dairy sections.

Cornucopia notified
Wal-Mart’s CEO Lee Scott in a letter on September 13, 2006, alerting
the company to the problem and asking that it address and correct the
situation immediately. But the same product misrepresentations were
again observed weeks later, throughout October, at separate Wal-Mart
stores in other states. “This is disturbing and a serious problem,”
Mr. Kastel said. “Organic farmers adopt and follow a rigorous
range of management practices, with audit trails, to ensure that the
food they sell to processors and retailers is organic and produced in
accordance with federal organic regulations. Consumers, who are paying
premium prices in the marketplace for organic food, deserve to get what
they are paying for.”

Earlier this year,
Wal-Mart announced a sweeping organic foods initiative and declared
that they would greatly increase the number of organic offerings for
sale in their stores at dramatically lower prices than the competition.
The move by the giant retailer has been under close scrutiny from members
of the organic community seeking to assess what impact Wal-Mart’s
decision will have on organic food and farming concerns.

A number of other
organic food retailers throughout the country, including Whole Foods
Markets and many of the nations member-owned grocery cooperatives, have
gone to the effort to become certified organic in terms of the handling
of their products and have invested heavily in staff training to help
them understand organic food production and sale concerns. “Our
management and our employees know what organic means,” said Lindy
Bannister, General Manager at The Wedge Cooperative in Minneapolis,
Minnesota. “If Wal-Mart intends to get into organics, they can’t
be allowed to misidentify ‘natural’ foods as organic to
unsuspecting consumers.” The Wedge, the largest single store member-owned
food cooperative in the nation, was one of the first retailers to go
through the USDA organic certification process.

“One can question
whether Wal-Mart has the management and staff expertise necessary to
fully understand organics and the marketing requirements essential to
selling organic food,” observed Mr. Kastel. “At this point,
it seems they are attracted by the profits generated from the booming
organic food sector but are not fully invested in organic integrity.
Given their size, market power, and market clout, this is very troubling.”

Cornucopia’s
complaint asks USDA to fully investigate the allegations of organic
food misrepresentation. The farm policy organization has indicated that
they will share their evidence, including photographs and notes, with
the agency’s investigators. Fines of up to $10,000 per violation
for proven incidents of organic food misrepresentation are provided
for in federal organic regulations.

This past September,
the Cornucopia Institute also accused Wal-Mart of cheapening the value
of the organic label by sourcing products from industrial-scale factory-farms
and developing countries, such as China. The Institute released a white
paper, Wal-Mart
Rolls Out Organic Products—Market Expansion or Market Delusion?,
that made the argument that Wal-Mart is poised to drive down the price
of organic food in the marketplace by inventing a “new”
organic—food from corporate agribusiness, factory-farms, and cheap
imports of questionable quality.

In addition to its
organic foods initiative, Wal-Mart recently announced its “Preferred
Chemical Principles” campaign to establish protocols for Wal-Mart’s
suppliers to report their chemical uses and voluntarily replace them
with more sustainable substances. According to the company’s press
release, it will work with suppliers to substitute 20 chemicals
of concern over two years. The Principles are meant to “establish
a clear set of preferred chemical characteristics for product ingredients.”
The first three chemicals are two pesticides, propoxur
and permethrin,
and a cleaning agent, nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPE).